


A Galaxy of Spiderwebs

by I_Got_Lost



Category: Coraline (2009), Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jim has a baseball bat, Kelvin Timeline (Star Trek), Kid Fic, Mentions of Myth & Folklore, Mentions of Starvation, New Vulcan, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Tarsus IV, The Tarsus Nine, other mother - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:13:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29528307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Got_Lost/pseuds/I_Got_Lost
Summary: Jim Kirk lives in a galaxy of spiderwebs. He has his kids, his crew, and the surety that the monsters that haunted his childhood are dead and long gone. Until, suddenly, one of them isn't.And it isn't the one that is easy to kill.-AOS Star Trek with mythos from Coraline and other fae stories.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This one, as always, is from a challenge and dare from Hazzardkitty. I don't know how often this will be updated but fear not, I actually have a plot!  
> As always, have fun, enjoy, and please don't shoot me!  
> -Lost

“What is your name, citizen?” The android drones.

Jimmy has got two skinned knees, the heat of the sun on his back, and blood running down his palms. He looks up to the looming hunk of tin, chokes on the dust in his lungs and on his shirt, does his best to pretend there isn't a cliff behind him, and says “My name is James Tiberius Kirk.”

(This would be the last time for over a decade Jimmy would say his name with pride.)

There is a car smashed to bits in the canyon behind him and Jimmy can’t help but grin as the smoke raises lazily into the air. Later, he will feel sick. Later, he will realize how close to death he had come. But later is still far off for the moment. His heart is beating like a drum in his ears, there are pinpricks of excitement and joy curling around his arms and settling into his fists.

He did it.

James Tiberius Kirk.

He drove that car. He smashed it to bits. He drove it off the cliff. (Later he will add on that he broke at least five laws, trespassed through six different fields, and pissed off Starfleet enough they actually pressed charges. How was he supposed to have known there was the bones of a starship being put together at the bottom of the canyon? How was he to know he blew up the beginning of the reborn Enterprise?)

Frank always said he got the wild from his father and none of the brains of his mother. Sam always muttered that Jimmy was too quick for such a slow brain.

Jimmy didn’t care. He had done it. He had proven there was a way to be a Kirk in Frank’s house. There was a way to be something more than a broken little boy from a broken little family. Sam would have to come back. Sam would have to admit Jimmy was right. Sam would have to…

Jimmy was picked up by the back of his too big leather jacket and his grin didn’t drop from his face until hours later when it finally dawned on him, sitting at the station, his jacket piled up under his head and his back against the desk of the night clerk, that no one was coming.

Sam wasn’t coming.

Frank’s screams still echoed in his ears from the comm link in Jimmy's dad's car, and Jimmy didn’t think anyone could ever call Winnia back from the black unless George somehow popped back up at the door and apologized for being so late. Jimmy was twelve years old, stuck at a police station, and slowly realizing that no one cared. No one cared that he had proven you could be a Kirk and still be planet side. No one cared that Jimmy was alright. No one cared further then the fact there was a car in ruins at the bottom of a ravine.

The police kept asking if Jimmy knew what he had done, and curled up against the desk, Jimmy was starting to realize that all he had done was smash a car. As far as the universe cared, Jimmy had simply proven an angry old farmer and Sam right.

His body was too quick for his brain.

Jimmy curled into the jacket and pretended his fingers didn’t slip over holes from where Sam had taken a knife to George's old Starfleet patches sewn into the fabric.

…***…

Jimmy was born into screams and the ruins of an exploding Starfleet ship. It was only fitting he would be damned off world into a work program under the same circumstances.

The judge slammed a gavel down onto the counter and peered over an old battered padd at Jimmy. “You, young man, are incredibly lucky Starfleet is going to drop the worst of the charges.”

Sitting and staring at the steel counter, Jimmy cynically wondered how any of this is luck. He's twelve years old. His mother refuses to appear even over comm, Frank doesn’t actually have guardianship, let alone parental rights, and his life has just been sold to the fleet.

Fleet already took his father, claimed his mother, and stole the light from his brother’s eyes. Now Jimmy owes the next five years to working for the fleet. His body has already been sold, what is the fleet going to take next? His soul?

Jimmy was born into screams and an exploding starship, he'll be damned if he goes out the same way.

…***…

Jimmy is twelve years old. He’s got anger beat into bruises on his back and ribs. His knuckles have never been clear of scrapes since he was old enough to remember, and he’s got a too quick body and a too slow mind.

Jimmy is twelve years old, he is dying by inches in a corn field and the day of his sentencing, he is hauled out onto an old tub of a hauler to be dragged off world. The small crew takes one look at him and doesn’t see Jame Tiberius Kirk, the Kelvin Baby. They see a pissed off little pint sized brawler and think  _ we can work with this _ .

The four months Jimmy is on the hauler, Neverland, he is never idle. The crew of sixteen have him work every station on the ship and force him to learn off every padd they have hidden away on board. Jimmy learns how to fix a warp core on the same day he learns how to accurately navigate an asteroid belt, and he is the only one who is surprised at the sheer joy these tasks alight in his eyes.

Jimmy was born into a family of geniuses, there was never any doubt that he wouldn’t be the same. Jimmy is angry and the crew of the Neverland don’t try to tell him not to be. They all saw the shiner he walked onto the ship with and they all read the report given by the juvenile detention facility, but these men and women were also children once and they pushed aside the warning in the file. Instead, they teach the boy to throw a punch, stitch a wound, curse in such a way a Kiligon would blush, and they push him to be so much  _ more _ .

Jimmy is twelve years old, he has anger burning through his veins and every day, that anger is slowly losing the kindling it had been choking on. Jimmy isn't saved by the Neverland, but it is the first time since he was a toddler that someone looked at him and thought the stars would reach down for this blond haired boy and snatch him away.

The crew looked at Jimmy Kirk and they wondered why no one had ever cared.

…***…

Jimmy turns thirteen years old elbow deep in the comms panel of the Neverland and two months out from Tarsus IV. For his birthday, he is given a small piece of replicated apple pie and a cup of ginger ale.

It is the first time he has ever celebrated his birthday.

The crew pretends they do not see his wobbly smile or the tears in the corners of his eyes. What they do instead is slap down a padd that holds the information needed for a Starfleet academy to print his ‘high school diploma' since he tested out of the courses.

Jimmy technically hasn’t even finished elementary school.

The Captain smiles over a cup of coffee as black as the universe outside the porthole. “Did you think we just having you underfoot for our own sake?”

Jimmy doesn’t bother to give this an answer. (He is there under court order after all.)

The Captain taps the padd with a finger. “You did the work. Most of it was caught verbally and transcribed, but congratulations kiddo, you're a minted high school graduate. All you have to do is sign.”

Jimmy looks down at the padd and then twists in his seat to stare at the fleet Officer that had been sent along for the ride to ensure Jimmy made it to the workhouse, and had instead melded perfectly into the engineering department.

The captain follows his gaze. “Yup, he signed off on it too.”

The officer (Jimmy had never bothered to learn his name. Too angry and stubborn to more than acknowledge the man as ‘avoid at all cost') lifts a cup and smiles. “All you needed was your guardian to sign, and well, here I am.”

Jimmy looks down at the padd and hopes his embarrassment isn't showing on the tips of his ears.

“Come on, Kirk. Sign it!” one of the navigators shouts as they burst through the door, juggling padds in their hands. “You really don’t want to do high school twice.”

“J.T.” Jimmy says, his hands shaking a bit as he picks up a stylist and scrawls out a chicken scratch signature. “I’m a teenager now, I think J.T. is a bit more appropriate.”

He doesn’t say that Jimmy got left behind somewhere between the ravine and a corn field. He doesn’t say that being James Tiberius Kirk felt like a horrid joke from the moment the comm to his mother just kept ringing and ringing and ringing. He doesn’t say that in the bowels of the Neverland, J.T. echoed clearly and with authority while Jimmy dropped between Jeffery tubes and the warp core.

The captain’s lips twitch up into a small smile and J.T. is given another slice of pie. “I hope you know this doesn’t mean you get out of your shift at the scrub down, J.T.”

J.T. let’s himself groan. “Aw, but it’s my birthday!”

(For the first time, this doesn’t feel like a sin.)

…***…

J.T steps out onto the landing zone on Tarsus IV and wonders if he ever left Iowa. Sure, the grass is an odd shade of green and the wheat swaying in the distance looks more like a winter crop then a spring growth, and the sun looks a little too small in the sky, but it's Iowa.

Corn field, cows, and all.


	2. Fair Harvest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *drops chapter 2*  
> Hey look! A chapter!  
> as awalys, have fun, enjoy, and please don't shoot me!  
> -Lost

J.T. sets down onto Tarsus IV, and he doesn't hate it. The ‘fleet officer that came down with him, gives him a salute, a smile, and points him towards a farmhouse in the distance. The man only sticks around long enough to ensure J.T. makes it to the farm house, and then he's gone. Back to the stars. In the end, he's just another figure in the long list of people that have left little Jimmy Kirk all alone in the world.

J.T arrives on Tarsus IV with a two month old high school diploma and a padd full of first year starfleet academy courses. He has a duffle bag full of Sam’s clothes, his dad’s old leather jacket, and a body too fast for his brain. (He leaves Tarsus IV with a leather jacket, no shoes, and a full year of starfleet academy under his belt.)

The farmhouse J.T. is directed to, is as new as the colony. Supposedly, the house was built to take in ‘troubled youth’ and ‘redirect them towards the better path’. In reality, it's cheap labour for a colony that relies mainly on homegrown produce to maintain the food supply. Fair Harvest, (J.T. will forever gag at the name, first for the tacky logo that is forced into his face, and second because of what comes later) takes J.T. in without a second thought.

He doesn’t know if the judge was aware that Fair Harvest hadn’t been up and running for long, or that J.T. is technically the only ‘troubled youth’ there. Oh, there are other kids running around, but they certainly aren’t there on court orders. Most days, Fair Harvest resembles a community centre more than anything else, and J.T., too young and too cynical, can’t help but  _ hate  _ the children. It’s nothing personal, but the hatred and the  _ longing  _ curls around his ribs just as equally as shame. 

(J.T. looks at the children of Tarsus IV and the patches torn out of his jacket  _ burn  _ against his skin.)

J.T. doesn’t know what Fair Harvest had expected of him, but he knows that Miss Mellony, the organizer of Fair Harvest, stands on the porch and simply stares down at a clipboard in dismay. Fair Harvest might not know what to do with him but they don’t know what to do with anyone else either.

J.T. has only been on Tarsus for a week and already, he has been sorted through three different groups and demoted to messenger. There are no general-use vehicles on Tarsus, or at least, none that aren’t designated for space travel. There are, of course, tractors and small four wheelers, but they’re for the farms, and only for the farms. However, Tarsus does have a rudimentary planet wide comms system, but that doesn’t do much for a farming community. Tools and parts still need to be fairied around the settlement and J.T. as one of the oldest children, can carry more than the other messengers conscripted for the cause. 

J.T. isn’t a soft child, not by a long shot, but the longer he stays on Tarsus, the more he seems to settle. He’s still got anger wrapped around his ribs but the desperation that had sharpened his teeth begins to spill away into a gentle contentedness. Here, there is no Frank, no Winnoa, no one shaking their heads that ‘little Jimmy Kirk is squandering everything his father ever gave him’.

J.T. still has walls wrapped around his heart and his soul, and he is liable to bite anyone who comes too close. (Later, he will acknowledge that this is what saved him.) But even these walls begin to shudder.

J.T. wears a Fair Harvest shirt as a uniform and never before has he wanted to burn anything as much as that stupid little smilely face silk-screened onto the poly-cotton he throws on every day. But the shirt identifies him as one of the charges of Fair Harvest (the only charge). And when David Adams comes crashing into J.T’s life, it is with a glance at his shirt and a wailing toddler thrust into his arms. J.T. is thirteen and he cannot  _ stand  _ children. (He cannot stand the way the kids look up at their parents as if they hung the stars and the moon in the sky on a whim. He cannot stand the way they look at their parents as if they could do no wrong.)

He grabs hold of the toddler by instinct and he is not sure who is more surprised, himself, or the little girl. The two of them stare at each other for a long moment. The little girl was frozen, her mouth wide open, and J.T. still holding her close. (J.T. has only ever been the youngest. Has only ever had to deal with the expectations of the older generations bearing down on him.) He is stuck, frozen in this unimaginable horror that if he even breathes wrong, the little girl will begin to scream once again.

He doesn't know why he does it. Why he lifts up a hand and ever so slowly drags a finger down the little girl's nose, only to poke her gently when the girl becomes cross eyed trying to follow the movement. (He will never know, but Sam, before everything had fallen to pieces, had once done the same. Had taken a crying Jimmy in hand and slowly lulled him to sleep with gentle fingers tracing patterns into his brother's skin.)

The little girl couldn't be more than a year, too baby to be anything else, and J.T. is absolutely enthralled. She has two little pigtails bound at the back of her head and J.T. can see the tips of two little perfectly pointed ears poking through her black hair. Instead of a ruddy red gracing her puffed up cheeks, J.T. watches as her pale skin turns a dark mossy green.

(On Earth, Sam used to drag Jimmy down to the creek and the two of them would go hunting for cave trolls and fairies. On Tarsus, J.T. holds onto a little girl and half wonders if he should be checking for glossimer wings and inside-out shirts.)

"What's your name little one?" J.T. eventually manages to breathe, his arms becoming a little deadened to her weight.

(J.T. doesn't know it yet, but this little girl becomes the first of his kids. She will not be the last.)

It is in the absence of her wails that Miss Mellony comes walking off the porch of Fair Harvest and trots up to J.T. with the frazzled man from earlier in tow. "Mr. David Adams and his daughter Sarah," she says, her face split with one of her ever present smiles, "are your new neighbours, Jimmy!"

J.T. would typically be gnashing his teeth and snarling that his name is 'J.T., thank you very much. Can't you read?', but little Sarah has one hand tangled in his shirt and another wrapped around the bottom of her jacket, and J.T. can't seem to care.

David extends a hand and J.T. makes a sort of shrug as best he can under the circumstances, none too willing to give up Sarah or try and juggle her weight with one arm. David, still frazzled and definitely embarrassed, aborts the movement and scrubs his hand along the back of his head in an all too human gesture. "Ah, yeah. Sorry about that. I just got a bit caught up in the, well... nevermind that, I can take her back."

David's got a voice like a rolling drum and a broken chord. Grief wrapped up in the bitterness of something J.T. doesn't want to recall. (His mind calls up memories of ripped up patches, photo albums torn out of his hands, and empty bottles instead of birthday cakes.)

J.T. holds Sarah a little bit tighter.

"Nah, I got her." J.T. says as he unconsciously angles himself to stand between David and Sarah. J.T.'s thirteen. He's old enough to know that adults lie and parents are the ones who will hurt you the most. (He's got the scars to prove it.)

There's a dozen different expressions that cross David's face, but it is that last one that makes the world of worries roll off J.T. 's shoulders. David has a soft little smile and a wonder in his eyes when he looks at his baby girl that makes something shattered in J.T.'s heart slowly begin to mend. It's not an instant fix and J.T. still doesn't like kids, but this? This is something different. This is something new.

"Well, in that case." David says, his head jerking towards the farmhouse, "why don't you come in with my little angel and we can get to know each other."

In the next few hours, J.T. learns several things about his neighbors. The first, is that David had been married. 'Had been' being the key phrase. His Vulcan wife had unfortunately passed away shortly after Sarah's birth and David had taken his daughter to the stars just after her first birthday. He had hoped to give his baby girl a fighting chance somewhere where her mixed blood didn't matter as much as her character did.

J.T. looks down at the little vulcan girl and wonders how anyone could think her less because of her blood. (He doesn't ask why David had not stayed with his wife's clan. He doesn't ask why his daughter has a very human name while having a very vulcan appearance. He does not ask how the man expects to raise a little girl, a vulcan to boot, all alone.)

J.T. looks down at a little girl who smiles up at him full of blind trust and faith, and for the first time in his life, he means it when he turns and says "welcome home."

…***....

Sarah tottles after J.T. every time J.T. walks through her field of vision. She is constantly begging for J.T. to pick her up, walk her around, and give endless one sided conversations. In some ways, Sarah is the only reason J.T. sits down and finishes his 'fleet courses. She sits on the edge of his bed during the day when David is out in the fields, and J.T. desperate for some way to entertain her, spills his essays and coursework to her as if it were the most fascinating bedtime stories imaginable.

(Entertaining Sarah is excellent preparation for what comes next, not that J.T. knows it at the time.)

Soon, keeping Sarah occupied changes to keeping Miss Mellony's nephew Kevin, entertained as well. Then it turns into helping Tommy with his homework when he popped over for the after school programs put on by Miss Mellony. Little Annie and Jacob follow soon after. Before J.T. knows it, he's got half a dozen kids and well, he doesn't hate it.

He doesn't hate the kids anymore, not really. He's still got shame wrapped around his ribs as if it were armour, but the sting fades every time one of the kids (his kids) looks up at him with a gap tooth smile. J.T. is thirteen years old and for the first time in his life, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, everything will be alright.

(J.T. was born into exploding ships and dying screams, it is only fitting he lives the same way.)

Then, the mold crawls into the crops.

And then, there is that  _ doll. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I seem to have a lot of fics with characters who love the stars and the sky.


End file.
